Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, currently being revived by Pacific Resident Theater, is a tough play to do right.

Chances are even if you only walked by a drama class in college, you’ve got a copy of the paperback on your bookshelf staring back at you. Without cracking it in years, you remember – like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , written two years earlier – that something nasty happens in the final act.

Or maybe, like me, you’re lucky and remember John Lahr’s quintessential commentary in the New Yorker that presciently foreshadowed Harold Pinter’s own death. Mr. Lahr wrote,

“The Homecoming changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theater was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes.”

That’s daunting praise, if like Pacific Resident Theatre, you’re thinking of mounting a production of one of Pinter’s best. It’s with that same trepidation that I went to see The Homecoming: I’ve sat through more than my fair share of horrid Pinter pauses.

Yet, I had hope. Guillermo Cienfuegos, who directed one of my favorite shows of last year – the beautifully spare Henry V at PRT – was at the helm. The cast looked promising . . .

I’m happy to say the risk paid off. The production is frightening, funny, profound, and most importantly does honor to Pinter’s “muscular” language.

Stylistically, it’s a straight-forward journey back to the darkness of 1960′s North London. Thanks to some inspired costuming by Christine Cover-Ferro, we instantly feel a sense of place. The set, while simple, provides the arena for the battle of words that’s about to erupt. All the key elements that you remember are there: the chair, the gaping hole of the removed wall.

The cast manages to fulfill your memory of the characters without succumbing to those limitations. As Ruth, the role originally played by Pinter’s own wife, Lesley Fera is powerful and appropriately inscrutable. Jason Downs is a suitably slimy and intimidating Lenny. To a person, it’s beautifully cast.

Time has been kind to The Homecoming. The initial shock has given way to a more complex appreciation. The humor is more accessible, the gender politics still disturbing if not quite as shocking. Pinter’s ambiguity sneaks up on us now. The conflicting versions of reality strike us as little more than family bickering until we find ourselves completely unmoored and wondering “what the hell is happening?”

My one quibble, and it is a quibble, is with the ending. To be fair, I’ve never seen a production that’s really nailed it. But I can’t help feel like there’s something more there. The play and this production are so finely crafted, I long for one more guttural punch at the end: something that takes my breath away.

If you love Pinter, or just really good drama, don’t miss this one.

The Homecoming plays at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice through July 26.

Harold Pinter was an Englishman who wrote powerful, controversial plays….so successfully that he was honored with a Nobel Laureate for Literature in 2005. I had the honor of meeting the dapper, delightful playwright in 1967 when I was production head of an ABC film company, Palomar, and we made a movie in England of his early play, “The Birthday Party.” Although the play had only run one week when it opened in London in 1958, it later was seen by 11 million people when it was telecast in 1960. Our small feature was notable mainly for the fact that I had hired a young untested Chicago television director, Billy Friedkin (his only previous feature credit was a Sonny & Cher movie, Good Times) to direct. He did a commendable job and you may recall that he went on to direct celebrated films like “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” Currently married to film exec Sherry Lansing, Billy got into a contretemp last year when he was directing a production of “The Birthday Party” at Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse and had a run-in with a British actor playing the lead. The actor walked (back to London), the show was cancelled a week before it was scheduled to open.

When I heard that the excellent Pacific Resident Theatre Company (703 Venice Blvd, four blocks west of Lincoln, with a parking lot at the rear of the theatre, (310-822-8392) was putting on a production at their Venice theatre of Pinter’s ‘THE HOMECOMING,” I made arrangements to attend an early performance with a friend in the company. You may recall that I favorably reviewed their performance last year of the critically-acclaimed Henry V, directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos, who was also directing this version of The Homecoming. I had first seen the Pinter play when it opened in New York in 1967 and, directed by Sir Peter Hall, it won the Tony Award as best play for that year. The female lead, Ruth, in that production was played by Pinter’s first wife, actress Vivien Merchant, also nominated for a Tony. (He later divorced her and, in a juicy scandal, married novelist Lady Antonia Fraser. It was a very successful, compatible marriage.)

Steve Spiro and Leslie Fera

I have seen several productions of it and think that it is probably Pinter’s best play. It’s been more than a decade since this Tony-award winning play has been seen here in Los Angeles, more’s the pity. It’s a powerful, weird and wonderful drama….typical Pinteresque twists-and-turns. Incidentally, as I entered the theatre on Friday night, I was greeted by the great character actor, Orson Bean, and companion Alley Mills, who both told me of their pleasure in reading these Huffington posts almost every day. “I played Lennie in this play over 30 years ago,” ‘O’ added. After the show, we caucused on the Venice Blvd, sidewalk and agreed that it was one of the better renderings of Pinter’s work any of us had ever seen. Superbly cast and brilliantly performed.

I don’t want to ‘spoil’ the story for readers, but I can tell you that it is set in North London, in a rambling old house there. All of the action takes place in the living room, and we meet the six characters comprising the cast. The patriarch of the family, Max ((Jude Ciccolella) , is a retired butcher whose wife died a few years before. (In a BBC radio production of the play done in 2007, Pinter played Max. He also played Lennie on stage in the 60′s.) Max’s brother, Sam (Anthony Fours) , early sixties, is a chauffeur, never married and the only sympathetic character. Max’s three sons are here: Lenny (Jason Downs) is a slimy one. Joey (Steve Spiro) is a dim-witted would-be boxer who works in “demolition,” and then there is Teddy (Trent Dawson), an expat philosophy professor who returns from six years in America with his British wife, Ruth (Leslie Fera). Ruth is, for me, the fulcrum character of the play, an attractive sexually-appealing mature woman who has a London background only later revealed. The brilllian actress Marwa Bernstein is alternating with Leslie on weekends in late June and July. Elspeth Weingarten produced the show and the indefatigable Marilyn Fox is Artistic Dirctor. It is a revelation to see such masterful acting performances in a small regional theatre!

This play is the epitome of Pinter’s syle: ambiguous, minimalistic, startling, often funny …a family romance and a turf war. The concept of family love is turned on its head here before the end. A reviewer once described it as a ‘moral vacuum.’ Yes, indeed. But fascinating, so I strongly recommend a trip down Venice Blvd. to that house in North London.

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The pith of Harold Pinter is in the subtext. Innocuous interchanges – about a pilfered cheese roll, a ticking clock, a piece of fried bread – take on layers of meaning and menace that transcend the infrastructure of text.

That is, given the right combination of director and actors. Together, they must dig in and do their homework in order to interpret this most challenging and rewarding of playwrights.

The stars certainly align in Pacific Resident Theatre’s current production of Pinter’s “The Homecoming” — an optimum effort from all involved.

The action is set in a working-class English household in 1965, before the advent of the metrosexual male, for whom cooking and housekeeping hold no terrors. And indeed, Norman Scott’s grimly claustrophobic set, with its grubby Charlotte Perkins Gilman wallpaper, is a distinctively masculine milieu, untouched by a female hand for many years.

The ruling rooster of this grubby roost – or so he would like to think – is Max (Jude Ciccolella). Max is the viciously irascible patriarch of a thoroughly unsavory clan, which includes Max’s unmarried and possibly homosexual brother, Sam (Anthony Foux), and Max’s sons, punch-drunk aspiring boxer Joey (Steve Spiro) and scheming Lenny (Jason Downs), who apparently makes his living by covert and criminal methods.

A surprise visit of eldest son, Teddy (Trent Dawson), a philosophy professor now living in America, and his icily attractive wife, Ruth (Lesley Fera), violently upends the balance of this womanless household. Ruth quickly becomes the cynosure of desire – and loathing – for her in-laws, whose atavistic longing takes bizarre twists.
Arts and culture in pictures by The Times | ‘Cinderella’

However, the dapper Downs and the reserved Fera are particularly chilling standouts. Fera has the stone-faced quality of a carved Madonna, but her Ruth conceals depths of blithe depravity, while Downs’ Lenny has the creepy impishness of a grown-up Peter Pan, always poised on the brink of mayhem.

]]>0editorhttp://www.pacificresidenttheatre.com/?p=112032015-06-05T17:04:16Z2015-06-05T16:51:05Z Read More...]]>For writers and actors of a certain age, the cultural revolution known as the 1960s begins in 1958. That year saw the premiere of The Birthday Party, the play perhaps most responsible for crystalizing its generation’s disenchantment with, and distrust of language in the elliptical ambiguities, pregnant pauses, paradoxical contradictions and ironic sense of menace that quickly earned the adjective “Pinteresque.”

And while Harold Pinter productions have become rarer in recent years — particularly in Los Angeles — the playwright’s casual savageries continue to echo in the work of Brits like Mark Ravenhill, Philip Ridley and Conor McPherson, and remain firmly imprinted in the artistic DNA of Americans like Neil LaBute and Tracy Letts.

Still, nobody does Pinter like Pinter. Which is perhaps why director Guillermo Cienfuegos’s remarkably accomplished revival of 1965’s The Homecoming, now playing at Pacific Resident Theater, comes with such a welcome sense of reuniting with a mischievous but dearly missed old friend. And it doesn’t hurt that this old friend has turned up in the company of such a finely tuned and exquisitely thoroughbred ensemble.

Like its title suggests, the play concerns the surprise home visit (on lighting designer Norman Scott’s neglected living room set) of Teddy (Trent Dawson), a North London-born professor of philosophy, who has been teaching in America. With him is his British wife Ruth (Lesley Fera) who he has brought to introduce to his somewhat loutishly lumpen family of vicious misogynists — a violently feral pack of men whose favorite pastime is the continuous testing and reaffirmation of a pecking order based in part on earning power but mostly on intimidation, humiliation and abuse.

At the top is Teddy’s brother Lenny (Jason Downs), a leering, insolently louche pimp of high-class whores in Soho; at the bottom is the family’s self-deluding widower-patriarch Max (Jude Ciccolella), a former bully who now exists in a perpetual state of emasculated, impotent rage. In-between are Teddy’s uncle Sam (Anthony Foux), a fastidious chauffeur of suspect sexuality and Joey (Steve Spiro), a lunkheaded laborer and would-be boxer.

But the hallmark of any Pinter from this period is that the “play” isn’t found so much in what passes for plot or even in the contempt underlying its dialogue. Rather, it exists between the words. And the key performance in this case is that of Fera. Her wonderful air of patronizing weariness in her scenes with Dawson so effortlessly conjures the devastating specter of the couple’s emotionally sterile marriage and existence of withering collegiate respectability in the U.S. that it suddenly makes probable the seemingly unthinkable choice she makes that turns the household on its head.

The production is by no means perfect. Cienfuegos pointlessly undercuts the classical precision of his staging with some superfluously ironic and overly cloying interstitial music, and Ciccolella sometimes allows his innate charm to get the better of Max’s petty and panicking ruthlessness. But such quibbles are far from wounding and hardly detract from what clocks in as a near-definitive Homecoming.

]]>0editorhttp://www.pacificresidenttheatre.com/?p=111942015-06-05T17:05:34Z2015-06-04T19:49:19Z Read More...]]>“Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?” says Lenny (Jason Downs, resembling young Malcolm McDowell) to his father, Max (Jude Ciccolella), in Guillermo Cienfuegos’ top-flight revival of Harold Pinter’s 1965 comedy The Homecoming at Pacific Resident Theatre. He doesn’t say it in a moment of fury. It’s just part of the East London family’s nonchalant repartee, spoken while reading a newspaper on a sofa. Dad calls all of his sons “bitches.” He instantly insults his English daughter-in-law, Ruth (Lesley Fera), upon her arrival with her hubby, who is Max’s prodigal son/professor of philosophy (Trent Dawson), visiting from their U.S. home.

Max greets Ruth (whom he’s never before met) by calling her a whore and a tart, and she’s absolutely unruffled. In a monumentally subtle, enticing and erotic performance, her stone-faced response to much of this family’s perverted shenanigans comes laden with world-weariness. When enigmatic Ruth starts giving herself sexually to both of Teddy’s brothers (in front of Teddy’s nonplussed, glazed-over gaze), she’s redefined by Max as “a woman of quality.”

The words in Pinter’s masterwork sound absurd, and have been locked into the theater’s mid–20th century genre of absurdism, but they are really quite logical and vivid expressions of the collective unconscious — among a tribe that has been for years drinking a toxic brew of impotence and hubris as a response to the same kind of latent violence in the English ether that permeates Lopez’s Southern California environs. The play is an antecedent to American works ranging from the plays of David Mamet to August: Osage County.

Cienfuegos’ ensemble couldn’t be better. It includes Antony Foux as Max’s brother Sam, a fastidious taxi driver with questionable sexual predilections, and the third son, would-be boxer Joey, played with an impressive thick-skulled gormlessness by Steve Spiro.

Cienfuegos’ timing of the poetically crafted repartee is brisk and seamless. Norman Scott’s set design gives us a “home” with clashing wallpaper designs that are, even without the occupants, dispiriting, as are Christine Cover-Ferro’s midcentury costumes. This is an awful, typical home, in an awful, typical world, and, in a way that’s penetrating rather than glib, it’s awfully funny.

]]>0editorhttp://www.pacificresidenttheatre.com/?p=111752015-06-05T17:06:03Z2015-06-04T19:31:51Z Read More...]]>Pacific Resident Theatre, Marilyn Fox has got hold of the rights to 1965′s The Homecoming and handed the reins to producer Elspeth A. Weingarten and director Guillermo Cienfuegos, and that’s the exact right way to keep the name of Pinter on the lips of the people who should be saying “Pinter.” Like me.

Philosophy professor Teddy (Trent Dawson) brings his wife of six years and mother of his three boys Ruth (Lesley Fera) home to meet his estranged blue-collar family: father Max (Jude Ciccolella) was a butcher, uncle Sam (Anthony Foux) is a chauffeur, and brothers Lenny (Jason Downs) and Joey (Steve Spiro) are a violent pimp and a rapist boxer. Before the happy couple gets to the old homestead, we see a snakes’ nest boiling over with potential hospitality. But the worst thing that happens when they arrive may be the very opposite of the horror you’d expect. Because real shocks, like laughs, come from surprise, you will find more of both here than in some entertainments billing themselves as horrorshows or comedies. If the subversive language doesn’t get you, the subversive themes and storyline will. If you haven’t read it since college, don’t. Just come to Venice right away. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Jude Ciccolella (in chair) and Jason Downs in Pacific Resident Theatre’s THE HOMECOMING.Cienfuegos uses Norman Scott’s clean, spare living-room boxing-ring of a set and coy, just-enough-to-see lighting to arrange bodies for declamation, intimidation, obfuscation, revelation. It’s almost as fine a play to watch as to listen to, but given the director’s excellent casting and work with actors (and of course the vivid script) it’s about the words, really, as it should be.

Or is it. It’s a very physical play, and those aforementioned bodies do much of Pinter’s work here, particularly Fera’s coolly dominant legs and eyes; then of course Ciccolella’s adamant fists and belly, and the quiet impudence of Foux’s understated exclamation point of a frame…not to mention Spiro’s reticent, hulking shoulders, Dawson’s stick-up-the-arse spine, and Downs’ entire insidious presence, which oozes and thumps and creaks: whatever’s worst, whatever’s needed. The whole show is like this, Pinter and Cienfuegos within the boundaries of their own hideous rules using whatever tactic will work to win.

And it does win. This is a show that defeats its audience, taking from you what you think is your philosophical position and pretzel-crushing it and handing it back to you in such a form that you drop it in disgust, and when it scurries and mewls you stomp on it and admit defeat in a voice breaking with anxiety at the very thought you ever had such ideas. And what, really, is theater for but that? The musical that doesn’t do that, the children’s show that doesn’t do that, the improv-games or sketch-comedy evening that doesn’t change your mind about something you were sure of: what is it for?

photos by Ashley Boxler and Erika Boxler

]]>0editorhttp://www.pacificresidenttheatre.com/?p=106512014-10-16T14:46:04Z2014-10-16T14:20:13Z
]]>0JudyTresthttp://www.pacificresidenttheatre.comhttp://www.pacificresidenttheatre.com/?p=105192014-09-11T13:00:18Z2014-09-11T12:59:25Z Read More...]]>Presented at the Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, California through September, Julius West’s translation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” maintains the true intent of the playwright as a Comedy mixed with Tragedy. The play is performed in traditional set and costume, but the language is one relatable today to the modern man with themes of Money, Love and Freedom.

The play centers on the Russian aristocrat Ranevskaya (Artistic Director Marilyn Fox), Gaev (Bruce French) her brother and their family inability to let go of their “Cherry Orchard” estate. Fox’s emotional performance showing Ranevskaya’s pain at past loss and French’s portrayal of Gaev as the doting brother reveals the true effect of an inability to let go and take action to prevent loss in the face of financial changes. A solution is presented passionately by the character of Lopakhim (Scott Conte) and yet it lands on deaf ears. Lopakhim represents the poor man who has risen to wealth and the middle class. Conte’s portrayal stays true to the actual text, making Lopakhim a man with the right intent who gets swept up in progress. In the end one is reminded of a much nicer “Wolf of wall street” ruled by work and less by nostalgia.Perhaps the most important element in any Comedy is love and the Pacific Resident theatre players do a beautiful job of showing its many colors. There is of course the love of family. There is the young love of Ranevskaya’s daughter Anya (Kelsey Ritter) and eternal student Trofimov (Kyle Johnston). There is Varya (Tania Getty) and Lopakhim (Conte) who represent perhaps the love of nostalgia that inevitably gives way to change. And there is blind physical and unrequited love shown in the triangle of clerk Yepikhov (Seth Margolies), maid Dunyasha (Mariah Shirley), and servant Yasha (Scott Jackson). There are many layers of love and each of these portrays bring points of sadness and laughter throughout the play.

Finally this play looks at the Concept of Freedom, one many American’s can relate to. Though this play has often been portrayed as Marxist, others have interpreted it as just a reflection of the playright’s life. Johnston’s portrayal of student Trofimov demonstrates the freedom that results from self control and the advantage of being studied, while Fox’s Ranevskaya is clearly not free due to her own lack of ability to control her urges of love and generosity. It is also made clear that surface appearances are not necessarily an indication one is free. Conte’s expressions clearly show that his interpretation of Lopakin is one who is financially free and generous yet internally still tied to the memory of where he came from making his actions laced with tragedy. JackWinnick’s portrayal of Firs as the doting worrying servant shows that his character is enslaved to a dying way of life, but also to the love of a family whose blind view misses the freedom that a financial change could bring. Actor Mary Jane’s portrayal of governess Charlotta Ivanovna demonstrates the freedom of practicality while her magic tricks bring light amusement. While, landowner Simeonov Pishchick (Aramazd Stepanian) is another performance demonstrating the effect on freedom of financial change as his character goes from clinging to dependence to one freed by foreign investment.

Overall the Pacific Resident Theater’s performers and Director Dana Jackson have truly stayed true to the text of Chekhov and created characters that are believable and likeable to an audience today. “The Cherry Orchard’s” mix of genres broke ground for modern literature. The play is complex as are its characters, realistic and compelling for an audience of today. One dangerous disappointment was the audience who were primarily over the age of 45. The play is portrayed as classical, but the performances and language is not. Young students of theater, art, and film would be wise to attend as often ideas of the future are born from the past.

Other actors in the performance include Passerby played by John Andrew Vaas, Stationmaster played by Barrie wild, and Charlotte’s dog played by Jack. For more information on tickets please visit the Pacific Resident Theater’s website.

If you are one of the many theatergoers who caught Pacific Resident Theatre’s production of Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Road (and possibly the special Christmas follow-up) during its unprecedented 6-month run, then you’ll likely be anticipating the third installment, The Unfryable Meatness of Being. If you missed Out There you might want to consider attending the special Sunday back-to-back productions of both plays. The double bill is sure to deliver a rewarding one-two punch to the uninitiated. While it is not absolutely required that you are familiar with the original, the enjoyment level is certainly enhanced if you have seen the first.

Unfryable returns us to the seedy West Virginia motel room inhabited by JD (Keith Stevenson), a man of questionable origins, and his down-on-his-luck roommate Mitchell (Neil McGowan). The odd couple is frequently visited by neighbor Marlene (Kendrah McKay) and owner Flip (Michael Prichard). When JD is challenged by Dr. Jorgen (Brad Greenquist)—a “devilish” cult leader—all hell breaks loose and a good deal of insanity and zany humor ensues.

Playwright Keith Stevenson has a way with words and a cockeyed view of the world which is at its least amusing and at its best hilarious. The characters are all clearly defined without becoming cartoony. It can be a shaky endeavor when the author also stars in the show but Mr. Stevenson is terrific in the role of JD. Under the direction of Guillermo Cienfuegos, he and the entire cast all turn in stellar performances. Mr. Cienfuegos’ brisk direction keeps the action moving and the audience engaged for the 90-minute two-act (the one-act Out There runs just over an hour).

Make no mistake about it: this is not hoity-toity theater. This is down-and-dirty low-brow humor that knows well enough not to take itself too seriously. If you’re in the mood for some mindless but very funny shenanigans you will be well-served by Unfryable. With summer coming to an end and the world falling apart around us a major dose of chuckles could be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Fried Meat 3: The Unfryable Meatness of Being
Pacific Resident Theatre
707 Venice Boulevard in Venice
Thurs – Sat at 8, Sun at 4:30
scheduled to end on September 7, 2014
for tickets, call (310) 822-8392 or visit www.pacificresidenttheatre.com
- See more at: http://www.stageandcinema.com/2014/08/29/unfryable-meatness-of-being

Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Pacific Resident Theatre
Through Sept. 7

RECOMMENDED:

Playwright Keith Stevenson’s delightfully quirky comedy is the third installment in a series of plays — a triptych of white trash comedies, each an episode involving the down-market residents of a flophouse motel in backwoods West Virginia. And what delights a Los Angeles audience more than laughing at the great, unwashed yokels and inbreeds who are doofy enough to live in the backwaters of Duck Dynasty country? It’s no wonder that the Fried Meat series has sparked three comedies so far – and we sense that there are more to come, just as long as folks in Venice don’t tire of roast possum, twinkie pie, and Mountain Dew a la chambre.

Each episode of the Fried Meat series can stand on its own terms, and here, director Guillermo Cienfuegos offers a sharply executed, excellent production. Of course, there is some assumed familiarity with the characters – but they are such rural archtypes from the get-go, we get them almost immediately. In this third installment of the series, performers, playwright and director are all comfortable with the characters and their personalities.

The play takes place in the seedy motel room shared by affable West Virginia bumpkin JD (playwright Stevenson) and former yuppie Mitchell (Neil McGowan). Although no summary of the previous episodes is provided, it’s quickly obvious that Mitchell is a downsized fellow who’s had no choice but to board with JD after his career and relationship fell apart. By this episode three, Mitchell appears to have made peace with his new environment and with the unhinged trailer-park types who have become his peers.

Meth-head Marlene (Kendrah McKay) is kicking her narco habit and trying to create a better life for herself, as she interviews for a job at the local sandwich market. Sadly, she has gotten in her own way by earlier sleeping with the guy she’s set to interview with – but Mitchell vows to tutor her in human resources. It looks like an off-beat, unusual romance will blossom between the pair – but then Mitchell’s pregnant former fiancée (Jennifer Pollono) shows up, throwing a wrench into the works. Meanwhile, a pair of spacy cultists (Carole Weyers and Joan Chodorow), who serve vaguely Mephistophelean cult leader Jorgen (Brad Greenquist), arrive at the motel, believing that JD might be the Second Coming of . . . something or other.

Stevenson’s play is really very light stuff, but it’s steadfastly appealing for all that, and the charm of the deftly assayed characterizations and tight, funny dialogue is hard to resist. It is clear that this cast and crew have worked together for a while and are having just as much fun as the audience is, which allows for much amusement – though this is probably not an experience with a dramatic impact that will last much longer than the show itself. Particularly appealing turns are offered by McKay’s strangely vulnerable drug-addict, and by Stevenson’s sweetly dopey backwoods doofus, and by the Weyers and Chodorow’s two cult girls.